Tag: Soren Kierkegaard

BY T. M. Elofson & Nico Chera

I glanced at my watch. The display read 12:36 AM. I groaned. I had to be up at six for work. And yet, for some reason, I just couldn’t settle down.

Across the room, I heard a sharp intake of breath as my roommate Nick rolled over.

“Bud,” I whispered, “You still up?”

After a moment, I heard him exhale slowly before responding.

“Yeah.”

“Something on your mind?” I asked.

“Yup,” I heard in the darkness, “Always.”

I rolled over to peer through the dark. I could make out that Nick had been looking in my direction from his bunk.

“Why don’t you tell me about it?”

After a moment, Nick began to unpack some of the thoughts that had simmered in his mind over the course of the last few days. He expressed frustrations, hopes, fears, and ambitions. He asked questions about life and made observations. Finally, he paused for a moment, as if he needed to scrape the back of his mind for the last of his concerns.

“You know, Tim,” he started, “I want to be a dad one day, but I know that no matter how good of a father I am, I’ll still fail in some way. I’ll give my kids insecurities or flaws no matter what I do, and I can’t avoid it. And, to be honest, that terrifies me. You know what I mean?”

“Sure. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t try.”

“Yeah, but the responsibility is way too heavy; I mean, it’s shaping someone for the rest of their lives, Tim. A human being! Messing up on something so precious…”

“Those are the real questions that keep us up at night: The toaster ones.”

You see, we have a love-hate relationship with our apartment’s toaster. It sits perched on the counter, its black matte and chrome glory tarnished by specks of rust. Some days, it works perfectly. On others, like the days when we happen to be running out the door, it is a devoted disciple of Murphy’s Law. Half of the toast (or waffle) ends up undercooked. The other borders on singed.

We have our theories about why this occurs, but despite our best efforts, it always seems to malfunction at the most inconvenient moments.

Honestly, it seems to me that we’re often like my apartment’s toaster – designed to do something important, but having a quirky tendency to misfire. And when it happens, we burn a lot more than just toast.

—

This summer, the rising juniors of the Honors College at our university will read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov – a story which follows three brothers as they wrestle with their father’s legacy. It’s become one of my (Tim’s) favorite reads over the course of my college career due to Dostoevsky’s skillful rendering of each of the brothers’ worldviews: The eldest son Dmitri is a sensualist who cares little for anything other than experience; Ivan, the second brother, an intellectual who cannot settle on a committed perspective other than cynicism; and Alyosha, a monk who seeks salvation.

I think the Brothers Karamazov has become one of my favorite pieces of literature because the three brothers can be used as stand ins for ways of living that we can fall into as people, that is, the physical, the mental, and the spiritual. I first realized this was the case when I read one of my peer’s papers trying to reconcile Dostoevsky with Plato’s notion of the tripartite soul.

And, while I disagree with Plato on some accounts, I think that humans do, in fact, have their identity rooted in a triune balance of the circles I previously mentioned.

These three circles emphasize that, within the human experience, there are realms in which certain items hold their being. A rock, for example, is fully physical. It has no spiritual or mental component. Likewise, a mathematical concept is based in the intellectual realm.

Finally, the last circle is that of the spiritual. This one is admittedly difficult to describe, and I suppose it is so for several possibilities. However, the reason I stick by is because, as Johannes de Silentio in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling states, the only thing you can say about faith is that, once you have it, you can’t really communicate it to others. Faith is concerned with a divine authority speaking into the lives of a community that may not abide by the same rules as the rest of the community outside of the faith. An example of this is someone trying to empirically prove that a guy rose from the dead and was also simultaneously divine and human. Outside the context of faith, it doesn’t communicate well. You might get a couple confused looks and raised eyebrows, though. I suppose that the closest we can come to talking about the spiritual circle is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer might describe as the sanctorum communio, the church which transcends time and space, i.e., the cloud of witnesses we hear about in Hebrews.

As humans, I believe that we are made to have our identity balanced between the three circles. When we overemphasize one or more sides, we become imbalanced and can fall into despair. According to Kierkegaard in another of his works, The Sickness unto Death, the human person is a project of becoming that is constantly trying to relate the elements of themselves that are finite and infinite. However, this task is impossible to do unless there is some form of divine agency which brings both together. This is because only the divine can reach the infinite without stretching itself too thin, neglecting the self that the divine had set out for the person with an equal footing in both dimensions.

For those who didn’t follow what I said, it boils down to the fact that in this respect, we’re kind of like the toaster that sits smugly in the kitchen. We overcook one side and undercook the others by ourselves. We get unbalanced because we spread ourselves too thin trying to be something we’re not. But, without a principle or narrative by which to develop, we have no way to figure out where that balance is or rein ourselves in to it should we strike upon it randomly.

Despair, then, is knowing, consciously or unconsciously, that we cannot generate meaning for ourselves ex nihilo – that is, in the void where a larger superstructure should, but being unable to move beyond it.

The reason why I love the Brothers Karamazov is tied to this fact, insofar that each of the characters start off as imbalanced and attempt to move towards or away from a more integrated understanding of themselves.

For those who choose to become more integrated, like Alyosha, their identity is rooted in the world around them while also mindful and guided by a metanarrative. But for those who choose otherwise, they find themselves increasingly disjointed, as seen by Ivan’s state at the end of the book being unable to land on a worldview more in line with that of Smerdyakov or that of Alyosha. We cannot exclusively ground ourselves in any one of the circles, but must move towards integration of the three through some means.

—

Perhaps because of that unresolved late-night talk about parenting and toasters, Tim and I (Nick) have since had a lot of conversations about who we are as people and what we should strive for. We’ve noticed that we tend to break our experiences down into three broad categories: physical, mental, and spiritual. At first, we treated those categories as if they were mutually exclusive, but the more we thought about it, the more we realized that the lines between them are really quite blurry. Then on top of that, we realized that we also had our own favorite categories and often judged the others through the lens of our choice.

For example, I have a heavy mental focus, so it’s easy for me to downplay the importance of taking care of my body. After all, the body is messy and “impure,” and it often gets in the way of rationality. My default tendency is also to dismiss people’s spiritual experiences as the result of emotional manipulation, confirmation bias, and/or the desire to see something that isn’t there. My default is to think the spiritual is an illusion. It has to be, my mind says, or else there are things which won’t fit into the categories and frameworks that the mental provides. I devalue the physical as well as the spiritual because they threaten my favorite way of understanding how the world works.

For other people whose focus is primarily spiritual, the realm of the physical is often thought of as a transient distraction, while the realm of the mental can be downright threatening. From my perspective, it often feels like spiritual people are afraid of asking hard questions because they are afraid that a meaningful answer may emerge which threatens their way of knowing the world. Perhaps spiritual people are sometimes afraid that the mental will boil down the unknowable and miraculous into something mundane. On the other hand, the physical, with its comforts and lusts and boundaries, is thought of as fleeting and therefore unimportant. Oftentimes spiritual people care a lot more about being ready for the world to come than about fixing the world’s problems here and now — it’s easy to use the spiritual reality as an escape from how awful the physical one can be.

Finally, overly physical people tend to avoid the spiritual and the mental both. Their default is to think that the most important thing is what we can see in front of us. Sometimes physical people think of the mental realm as unimportant because in its contemplation, it creates barriers to action–these kinds of people believe we need to think less and do more. Similarly, the spiritual can also be viewed as a distraction, except the other way around. Some pie-in-the-sky promise or ‘higher calling’ shouldn’t get in the way of what we need to do here and now. Physical people might also try to avoid the mental or spiritual by distracting themselves with more extreme pleasures or shinier possessions.

In reality, our experiences are usually some kind of combination of these categories, and thinking about them or experiencing them only in one of those ways prevents us from understanding more fully and being more whole as people. If you’re like me, some of these phrases I just used may even have struck you as odd. Calling a group of people ‘mental people’ kinda makes it sound like they’re insane, calling them ‘physical people’ makes it sound like they’re violent or sensual, and calling them ‘spiritual people’ makes them sound like monks or nuns or gurus.

It’s almost like we intuitively know that restricting ourselves like that hurts us, and yet we do it anyways. For however many reasons, we choose to prevent ourselves from becoming balanced. The reality is that we are physical, mental, and spiritual beings, and we absolutely need to respect and understand all three parts of ourselves if we want to be healthy. If we don’t, we risk becoming malfunctioning toasters.

—

The first step in fixing any problem is realizing that there is one. And if we’re being honest, we could all be more balanced people. The thing that’s hard for me (Nick) is the fact that acknowledging a problem doesn’t fix it. No matter what I do, I will, for the rest of my life, make mistakes that have damaging consequences for myself and others. Somehow it feels inevitable. Despite my gifts and talents, I often feel like the worst of toasters.

In the end, I (Tim) think it all comes back to toast. Well, bread and wine actually. Or body and blood. By itself, bread is just bread, and we humans are, in and of ourselves, flawed beings. But something happens to that bread, whether one believes it to be in the imagination or reality, when it becomes something more in context of a community oriented toward God, where grace can be encountered, even though it may seem absurd. And something happens in people, too, when grace can be shown, calling us toward something holier, even in spite of ourselves.

There’s a passage in Galatians 2 that is usually translated as “The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Interestingly enough, it can also be translated as “I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

It’s so easy to compartmentalize ourselves and our Christianity into one of those sectors, sometimes leaving us wondering how we could possibly be the people that God wants us to become. There’s part of me that thinks that, as Kierkegaard waves from the sidelines, the reason why is because we aren’t seeing correctly. Becoming ourselves may be the human project, but we would be sorely mistaken to think that we are the architects of that project–it begins and ends with God.

While we are most ourselves when we land in a place shared by all three of these circles, this isn’t to say that when we are decentered the actions we do are irredeemable. Even when the toast burns, you can scrape off most of the char. That is to say, yes, we make decisions and slip up from time to time. We have our virtues and our vices alike. And yet, there’s the absurd reality that despite our sin, we seem to come out all the more polished in the end. After all, Christ carries us always, even when we break down.

He’s why we need toast for more than just food in a physical sense. Frederick Buechner once wrote that eucharist/communion is “…a game we play because he said to play it.” He concludes, saying, “Play that it makes a difference. Play that it makes sense. If it seems like a childish thing to do, do it in remembrance that you are a child.”

When we are invited to take all three circles as they are, and not as we should like them, it won’t always seem to make the most sense. Abraham offered up his son as a sacrifice with full trust in the strength of the absurd, expecting that somehow he would have Isaac restored to him; he believed this despite the fact that it flew in the face of reason, experience, and basic common sense.

And while we are not called to the same actions, it stands to reason and experience that no matter how burnt or undercooked the toast may be, there is always space for redemption.

I think the same can be said for us, as well.

Even at 12:36 in the morning.

—

Nico Chera is a rising senior attending Azusa Pacific University majoring in Computer Science and the Humanities within the Honors College. He enjoys toast – lightly buttered.

I dropped my brother off at the airport the other day. He had grabbed a friend of his one Friday afternoon and started driving from the Massachusetts coast in a southwesterly direction. His plan, to my knowledge, was to make his way to Chicago and then take Route 66 all the way to my college town just outside of Los Angeles, taking detours whenever they saw fit to see some genuine Americana along the way.

If I hadn’t been informed that he had planned to end his journey across the country at my apartment, I would have thought he might have just intended to wander for a while.

As he picked his way west, he documented his progress on his Snapchat story within a series of Captain’s Logs – so-called for the unspoken reason that it just seemed to fit the spirit of the occasion. This was an adventure after all. And adventures require a bit of whimsy from time to time.

And even though my brother and his buddy documented their journey, I still feel tempted to say that they didn’t get to really see some genuine Americana. They didn’t have time to, anyways. They were going too fast.

I sat in the airport parking lot for an hour, wondering whether increased mobility is always a good thing. As I watched my brother’s Snapchat story updates, I noticed how the landscape behind him seemed to blend together into a vibrant blur. Galileo once noted that “the only motion which is observable to us is the one which we do not share.” But when we’re the ones moving, everything else seems to become less distinct.

The author Soong-Chan Rah writes that “Contemporary life is characterized by movement, oftentimes at high speeds, with the absence of any real connection to the world around us.”[1] When we have the ability to move, especially to a pasture that seems greener, we become less invested in the one we find ourselves in at the moment. “We learn early on to keep our options open,” writes Kathleen Norris in the foreword to Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove’s The Wisdom of Stability, “We consider stability tedious at best. At its worst it is seen to restrict our freedom and limit our potential.”[2]

I drove back toward my college town, lost in thought. The headlights of those heading back into the city appeared like bright streaks through the windshield, passing by without much of a second thought and disappearing into the darkness. Upon getting to my exit, I continued onwards, eventually finding myself driving up into the nearby mountains and parking at a place that gives a view of the surrounding towns. Below, stood a thousand, no- ten thousand points of light against the black backdrop.

How many of those lights had I been to? How many of them represented families or businesses I had never met or frequented? When we are trying to get to the next place, we miss out on all of the millions of possible experiences around you in the current moment. We instead get an idea of what some place or some people are like without much else. We mistake the shallow glimpses as the full thing.

But how did we get here in the first place?

In my summer class, we’ve been going over some of Kierkegaard’s works. In his Either/Or, I think I found my answer. Kierkegaard, in the persona of an aesthete, writes that “The more you limit yourself, the more resourceful you become.”[3] Here, the aesthete is concerned with not being bound by meaningful commitments – as that would demand his or her involvement in living in a manner which also has to take the other party into consideration. Instead, it is good to always practice what the aesthete describes as crop rotation – that is, avoiding activities that require repeated efforts in order to avoid boredom but instead doing the thing that is always new, always fresh.

The catch, of course, is that eventually, even that will become boring, as all activities will become run of the mill, leading him or her to despair.

I think the same mentality has gotten into the psyche of a good many people, myself included. Many of our problems, suggests Wilson-Hartgrove, come from our mentality that success is always defined by moving up and out.[4] It’s because we’re afraid of restricting ourselves.

As I looked out over the city, I glanced at my smartphone. A green light indicated that I had received a message on Facebook. It was from a guy who I’ve gotten to know over the course of the past year.

Do you ever think that some people are more special than others? My screen read. Because I think that God made me for something big… That I am made more important and more special than others.

I think the funny thing is that we all happen to foster some of the same attitude expressed by my friend. I think that’s why we feel driven to constantly move to the bigger and better-looking experience. We don’t want to settle for anything less than what God has for us.

And yet, the Christian thinker G.K. Chesterton wrote why, practically speaking, this mentality is unhelpful at best, and paralyzing at worst. He states:

All the will-worshippers […] cannot will, they can hardly wish […] they always talk of will as something that expands and breaks out. But it is quite the opposite. Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense, every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else… it is impossible to be an artist and not care for laws and limits. Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame.[5]

Perhaps then, as we constantly strive for the greener pastures and commute out of the less favorable places, we should keep this notion in mind. In order to be invested, in order to affect meaningful change, we ought to consider that perhaps the place where God is calling us is the neighborhood right where we are living.

As I drove down the mountain back towards my university, I recalled the ending of the story of the demoniac at the Gerasenes. As Christ and his disciples begin to head off into the sunset, the former demoniac runs after them and begs Jesus to take him with them. But Christ refuses. Instead, Jesus suggests, tell everyone in the surrounding area of what happened here. And with that, they push off from shore and sail off into the distance, the demoniac still standing at the seashore.

What if our greatest form of ministry is right in front of us, and yet we miss it because we think Jesus wants us somewhere else? What if our call to ministry is a call to put down roots somewhere and stay for years on end?

“Mobility, and the speed of that mobility, result in the ability and the power to disregard and disconnect from suffering.” Rah concludes, noting that “There is no space or time for the theology of celebration to intersect with the theology of suffering—there is only motion that dulls the senses.”[6]

To be a minister of the gospel means, I think in part, to embed oneself in the story of a place and see how healing and the newness of life can be brought forth from it. If we simply plan to pass on through, we barely get a glimpse of it as it blurs together through the rearview mirror. There must be something more, something longer lasting than a shallow engagement with the world around us to change it for the better.

It’s a challenging thought, I know, I stand guilty of it myself. But as I pulled into the parking lot of my university late that evening, I paused once more to take another look at the place where I have called home for three years and for at least one year more.

There’s a lot of living to be done in one place. And a Snapchat story kind of life simply can’t cut it.

“God creates everything out of nothing. And everything which God is to use, he first reduces to nothing.” -Soren Kierkegaard

I used to think that a regular practice of kenosis (“the emptying of self”) was mainly for the sake of talking to people I normally wouldn’t. Now, I understand that kenosis also reveals, to those who practice it, the person of Christ located properly within a theology of suffering.

My mentor and I sat down to grab lunch at one of the more popular dining options on our university’s campus. After chatting about the weather and classes – those which he was teaching versus those which I was taking – he noticed that I had barely touched my food, resorting to simply pushing a fry from one side of my plate to the other. My brow was furrowed.

He blinked. Leaning back from his daily special that he had been working through, he let out a sigh. Waving a hand, he remarked, “But enough about your classes, I’m assuming you have something on your mind. How are you doing, really?”

I let out a laugh more bitter than a typical cup of three-day-old coffee which has sat unused in a French Press. “Yeah, about that.”

Looking at him, I muttered, “I used to think that Paul wasn’t being serious. I thought he was using hyperbole when he said that we are dead in our sins.”

“But now,” I paused, “Now I think I am beginning to understand. I’m starting to see that my righteousness is like filthy rags.”

He nodded. “That’s a pretty valid point for most of us. All of us, I would argue.”

Yet, still, it was as if a crack had formed in the wall holding back a flood of thoughts, doubts, and fears. My demeanor began to crumble. “And the thing that gets me the most is,” I said, my voice growing louder as I continued, “That, when we get down to it, I realize that even what I consider as goodness and virtue is motivated out of pride, a desire for control, and a fear that I am not who I have portrayed myself as.”

I tapped the table, stressing each syllable as I pronounced them. Words like rocks hit the floor and began piling around my feet. “God, I hate myself sometimes.”

He was silent. His eyes scanned my face as I stared at the table with the same intensity as if to count every speck which made up the design of its surface.

“Nothing! Nothing I do is ever goodin its entirety!”

They say that in Hebrew, the word for one’s face is the same as that person’s presence–as if to suggest that to really see a person’s face is to bear witness to their very soul. Little wonder, then, that as my mentor witnessed tears, hot with frustration, strike the tabletop between us, I could sense that, for one of the first times, I knew that he could see who and where I really was.

“No matter how hard I scrub my soul, it’s still filthy.”

And for some time, a holy silence rested between us. Somewhere, some time, a slight smile flickered across his face.

“You know, being nothing is a good place to start. God usually creates from nothing.”

“Being nothing sure feels like I’m nothing but dirt.”

“I know,” he said. “Boy, do I know.”

—

A few days ago, I found myself at a church during a Celebrate Recovery session. Celebrate Recovery is the Christian equivalent of any recovery program which was started out of Rick Warren’s church almost twenty-five years ago. The beauty of this program is that participants place their hope in the higher power of Jesus Christ, explicitly. People, regardless of demographic, come to bear one another’s burdens and sins, offering, in turn, the grace and truth of God in equal measure.

I almost felt like a complete outsider, an observer without any draw toward a program like this, until I heard someone share that they struggle with pride and self-acceptance. Suddenly, it was as if Jesus himself was speaking to my soul.

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus sets the characters of a religious leader and a tax collector against one another to illustrate a point, stating:

“Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” [1]

Typically, the Pharisee was looked up to as an illustration of what people ought to strive for in regard to holiness. Tax collectors, on the other hand, were considered among the vilest of society.

In walking into Celebrate Recovery, it was as if I walked into the midst of Jesus’ own parable. I am well on my way, in more ways than one, in becoming like the Pharisee. And many people would consider the people who attend accountability groups like Celebrate Recovery to be of the same class as the tax collector. I think they’re right. But not in the way that they intend.

I think that Celebrate Recovery, and groups like it, are places for where people are more open about what they wrestle with. I think that they are more in touch with being human than most of us, too.

I am just as much in need of grace and love and forgiveness as each and every one of my brothers and sisters here. On what grounds should I even think I am better than them, that I don’t need just as much grace (if not more!) as the next person there? For every person there, they own and voice their flaws and shortcomings, seeking help and community. I still cling to my pride and desire for control because they are familiar.

Who here is closer to God, then? Who here is just playing games?

Frederick Buechner once commented that recovery groups like A.A. or Celebrate Recovery “is what the church is meant to be and maybe once was before it got to be big business. Sinners Anonymous. “I can will what is right but I cannot do it,” is the way Saint Paul put it, speaking for all of us. “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Romans 7:19).” [2]

When you realize that you are in over your head, you have a greater propensity to run back to the one we can call Abba Father – Daddy, in other words. No wonder why Jesus mentioned that the spiritually poor are blessed – they know this to be true. When you find yourself in over your head, you realize in your darkest moments that you cannot save anybody, even on your best day.

But it is here that you realize that in this, in the fact that you are not anyone’s messiah, you also recognize that the reason why God has you here is not to bear the burden of others’ salvation, but to spend time cooperating with the Father, being fully present to those with whom you find yourself. There is no pressure to be perfect because God is, instead. All we need to do is be there, and bear one another’s burdens as a brother or sister. Compassion simply means “to suffer with.” Not save.

When Peter protested that Christ would even stoop so low to wash his feet, Jesus responded by stating, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.”[3] Peter, like many of us, found himself in the uncomfortable position where Jesus began to wash his feet, an act reserved for the lowest slave or servant within a household in the Ancient Near East. Christ was too good, too honored, too holy to wash the grime from everywhere that Peter had been in the past seven or so days.

Likewise, when Christ reveals himself in our moments of self-emptying, I think we are prone to try and skirt away from his ministering to us. We, rather, should be ministering to him, our Lord and Savior, in the least of these. Shouldn’t we?

But I think the reason why Christ still comes in the form of the least of these to minister to us is because each and every person that we encounter is a reminder that we are in need of grace and cleansing in some way, too.

If I realize that, on my own, nothing I can do or be is ever good – that’s kind of the point of needing Christ in the first place.

—

A week passed between my conversation with my mentor before I found myself seated in a liturgical style chapel at my university. His words he offered were helpful, but nothing had changed in terms of my mood. I had tried reading Scripture and meditating on God’s love and forgiveness. Prayer seemed like an empty respite. It would be another two weeks before I would speak with my mentor again. Yet, as the pastor presiding started to deliver the Eucharistic rite, something happened.

“Come to this table,” he said as he widened his arms in a welcoming gesture toward all, “Not because you must but because you may…”

It was as though the voice of the speaker trailed off. No longer could I hear him. My heart beat in my ears. I could hear the breath inside my lungs. I could barely hear his next words.

“Not because you are strong, but because you are weak…”

I realized I had been holding my breath. I exhaled. Suddenly, tears flowed once more, freely.

God wants me anyway. He wants to work with me, on me, for me, despite me.

I blinked as the Gospel made itself clear to me once more, a ministry major of all people. Realizing that I am nothing feels a lot like reducing me to dirt. I think that it’s because it’s the way which God goes about reminding us of who is the Potter and who is the clay. It’s his way of letting us know who is the Savior and who needs the saving.

I sat there in my chair, silent as I felt full of meaning and purpose once more, even despite my emptiness. Kenosis is as much for the person emptying him or herself as much as it is for others.